Violence and Dystopia:

Mimesis and Sacrifice in Contemporary Western Dystopian Narratives

By Daniel Cojocaru

Cambridge Scholars Publishing TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix

Chapter One 1 Introduction 1.1 Modern Dystopia 1 1.2 Rene Girard's Mimetic Theory 10 1.2.1 Imitative Desire 10 1.2.2 Violence and the Sacred 16 1.2.3 Girard and the Bible 20 1.2.4 Criticism of the Girardian Paradigm 29 1.3 Violence and Dystopia..... 35

Chapter Two 40 Scarifices 2.1 J.G. Ballard's Crash - Revolutionary Millenarianism by Car 40 2.1.1 TV-violence and Car Culture as Mediators of Reality 42 2.1.2 The Crash: Breaking Through the Isolation of the Car 46 2.1.3 The Wounds Do Not Heal: Holes in the Baudrillardian Simulation 48 2.1.4 The Scarifice - Sacrifice by Car 52 2.2 Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and Rant, and Brad Anderson's The Machinist 68 2.2.1 Palincest in Fight Club 68 2.2.2 Rant 82 2.2.3 The Machinist 93

Chapter Three 98 Atro city 3.1. Iain Sinclair 99 3.1.1 Structuring the Unstructurable 99 3.1.2 Downriver I 107 3.1.3 Rodinsky's Room 115 3.1.4 Downriver II 124 3.1.5 Sinclair's Aura 139 3.1.6 Scapegoating The Widow 141 viii Violence and Dystopia

3.2. Peter Ackroyd 144 3.2.1 Hawksmoor 148 3.2.2 Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem 15 1 3.2.3 London: The Biography 154

Chapter Four 159 Crowds 4.1 J. G. Ballard 160 4.1.1 High-Rise 160 4.1.2 Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come 167 4.2 Stewart Home 184 4.2.1 Come Before Christ and Murder Love 191 4.2.2 Defiant Pose, Red Londen and Blow Job 196 4.3 David Peace 207 4.3.1 The Red Riding Quartet 207 4.3.2 The Miners' Strike of 1984/85 214 4.3.3 Battling to the End 217 4.3.4 GB84 220 4.3.5 A Note on Hope in the Red Riding Quartet 233

Chapter Five 238 Violentropy 5.1 Radon Daughters 238 5.2 Margaret Atwood 252 5.2.1 The Handmaid's Tale 252 5.2.2 Oryx and Crake 264 5.3 Will Self 281 5.3.1 Girardian Themes in Will Self's Fiction 281 5.3.2 The Book of Dave 295

Chapter Six 305 Conclusion

Bibliography 309

Index 327